We have seen the enemy and it isn’t us

John, you might as well turn the comments off on this one. You’re going to keep talking to yourself in any event.

What can I do to insulate myself from Sunstein’s views? Short, that is, of giving up entirely on liberal blogs?

And your post is about as perfect an illustration of Sunstein’s.

I absolutely refuse to seek any timber that isn’t crooked.

lee, it may be that only a thousand people on the right create the entire “echo chamber.”

but isn’t it more impressive that John is able to create an echo chamber entirely in his own head?

Hmm, earlier commenters here seem to wish for High Broderism: it’s all good!

If we can’t discuss legalizing torture and endless war and the descent into the fascist surveillance state in a civilized way, well then there’s non-communitarian *bias*!

I’ve gotten boring about this again. There is no way that you can support discussing endless war and torture as a plausible option and be a moral human being.

Sorry. You’re a monster.

Hi there Cass Sunstein. I don’t much respect you.

Thamas, having done no more than express the same sentiment three times (#1, #5, #9,) you may want to look up the definition of “echo chamber.”

The last two paragraphs are meant to be in italics.

Note again that, for Republicans the reverse analysis applies with “the rest of the human race” in place of Republicans.

Stephen Colbert famously said, “reality has a liberal bias.” By the way, a majority of his guests on the show happen to be conservatives, whose views are often but not always ridiculed. Same used to be true for Bill O’Reilly show regarding liberals. Since I’m now in the liberal echo chamber myself, near-exclusively relying on the internet for daily news feed, I’m not sure if that still holds true.

Gosh, and I was just about to boldly challenge the vile Quiggin’s mendacious praise for the benefits of an all-cheese diet. I shall slink away.

I would say, however, that the more extremely one misses the point, at the moment, the more probable it is that a Westerner will be aligned with movement conservatism.

But that would be impolite, so I won’t.

I’ve always thought that book was basically a completely wrong-headed bit of pontificating which stroked the ego of a particular professional class. The subtext is essentially “THAT SCARY INTERNET” – it makes political extremists, not like the cool heads of us in the chattering class, who are sure to listen to everyone who matters – oh [wring hands], what can we do to fight this threat to the Republic? (pun intended)

I’m sure he’d say there’s more to it. But in my observations, that’s how it plays in the media. All the errors in his model don’t matter, because of that attention-grabbing storyline.

People with a high tolerance for comment-threads might be interested in this forum on the book in its first edition:

http://press.princeton.edu/sunstein/sun_forum.txt

I think John is absolutely right on this one, by the way – before the internet, I would never have known that there were people out their writing books which proved to their own satisfaction that American social democrats were the true intellectual heirs of the Nazis. But now I know there are, it doesn’t really make me any more likely to have a conversation with them. It’s rather like before the internet I didn’t know that there were such things as furry fetishes, but the knowledge that there are, has changed my own sex life hardly a whit.

Certainly I’m more polarized and less tolerant in a bunch of aspects of my worldview precisely because of more contact with alternatives. (And I deeply admire the last sentence of Dsquared’s #22 and wish I’d had anything as clever and had posted it first.)

As an American with a longstanding interest in kookology, I knew that these kinds of nut cases were out there. But it’s thanks to the net that I see the connections between them and the governing elite, how the latter uses the former to bring ever more radical ideas into the mainstream, and the harm all this does to civil order, justice, and other things I’m fond of. A lot that used to seem amusing and irrelevant no longer does. And as my sense of how the whole works changes, I find myself with more and more angry contempt for all the clever people who use “NPR voice” to keep this disgusting crap in place, who trample on the very foundations of moral choice with bullshit rhetoric, and otherwise subjugate their humanity to the tyrants du jour.

But it’s not talking with the likeminded that makes me feel those things. It’s going and interacting with the others that does it.

One problem is the belief polarization effect: exposure to conflicting views makes people more certain of their own.

What’s a furry fetish?

Furrys are a ‘subculture’ of folks who dress as fantasy ‘animals’, sometimes cartoony..Some of these folks have sex dressed up so..
See http://www.humantruth.info/furry.html

The mindset might be understood by example with this clip of last years ‘Furry vs Klingon’ bowl off held in Atlanta.

31. but the US is so large and so dominant on the internet that its bigots are omnipresent.

But magistra, didn’t we read recently that the largest plurality of blogs is by Japanese people doing LiveJournal-style ruminations on their daily lives? I reject the notion that other nations are closing the “bigotry gap” with the US. When your quaint little Enoch Powells start becoming heads-of-government, then maybe we can talk about granting you Most Bigoted Nation status.

Mr. Art: It’s true. Not all Republicans are either LGF/Malkin-style bigots or deliberately exploiting them. Some are too stupid or ignorant to realize how their party has actually worked since 1994, and some believe that they personally are so suave, illuminated, or otherwise blessed as to be unaffected by it all. So there are jerks and fools as well as bigots and users. There are, however, no Republicans who are simultaneously informed, honest, and moral – either they’re uninformed, they’re lying to themselves and/or others about how their party works, or they are at heart fine with hatred, cruelty, and avarice as the foundations of all policy.

I didn’t always think so. But it’s been year after year of the rank and file continuing to go along with it all. At some point sheer naivete stops working as an excuse.

The Democratic Party has a large and diverse contingent of dissenters against the Democratic side of the War Party, who are regularly pressuring the leadership, supporting challenger candidates, and so on. The Republicans have nothing comparable – the only active challenge to the Republican side of the War Party is led by a friend of and tool for racists who’s bent on restoring the last grand era of plutocracy even more than Bush and Cheney. The choices for Republicans are kleptocracy with war or kleptocracy and nothing else. If the rank and file would like the rest of us to stop holding them in this sort of contempt, they could start showing any interest in alternatives that include the rule of law, competence as a value in governance, so on.

Bruce, you left out what seems to me the big potential schism in the GOP: immigration. I don’t think this is any more flattering to Republicans.

This is interesting:

The most optimistic take on this is that the Internet has merely accelerated a US-specific process that was well underway by the 1970s, with the emergence of self-conscious movement conservatism. The availability of blogs, Google and so on has killed off the illusions of the DLC and Broderism about the possibility/desirability of compromise and assisted the emergence of a similarly self-conscious movement on the left.

I usually date the impossibility of compromise to 1992, when Dole and Gingrich decided not to accept the legitimacy of Clinton’s victory; and so they whipped the GOP caucuses into unanimous opposition to many of Clinton’s significant plans. AFAIK it was completely unprecedented that every single member of the minority party voted against proposals that had the support of most of the majority. But, this was the first time since the 1970s that the GOP had to deal with a Democratic president. So maybe the rise of movement conservatism had already killed off the possibility of compromise from the right, and it took a Democratic president to bring that out.

John, you misunderstand your own post: there was no reply I could make that wouldn’t confirm your priors.

DD, your cleverness never ends! But are you even familiar with the book? If you were, you might recognize that John hasn’t quite grappled with the argument.

Now, I’ll let you get back to ‘ridiculing out of existence’ any contrary views!

Slocum, I hope your mother is fine and all, heard she was a fine lady. If she did vote for Bush in 2004 though, she did ensure the continuation of a war that was causing thousands of deaths and the perpetuation of a system that condoned and organized arbitrary internments and torture on a massive scale. Why she would do that is beyond me, but ignorance is the kindest explanation I can think of.

Moreover, it does not rely on the exclusion of alternative views so much as on the availability of a distorting filter in which any opposition can be ridiculed out of existence.

Well said.

Abb1, I’m talking precisely about what folks do when they’re disgusted.

The Democratic Party has some very active dissent right now. It’s hopelessly screwed when it comes to Congress, thanks to a capitulated leadership, but outside the halls of power, we have folks running for office and supporting those who are, maintaining pressure for a variety of causes, and otherwise being sometimes productive nuisances. It’s a pretty classic bosses-versus-others struggle.

I don’t see anything comparable in the Republican Party. There’s no Republican equivalent to (say) MoveOn, no group agitating for honest accounting, competency as a high priority, or any other pre-Goldwater Republican virtue. There’s no Republican group pressuring for adhering to the Geneva conventions, nor promoting the idea of solid friendly relations with as many nations as possible as good for business. Nobody on the Republican side is making public noise about declining standards of living for America’s working and middle classes, nor the damage this does to family values. There’s this huge gap around enthusiasm for theocracy, kleptocracy, and perpetual war. Any Republican who seriously questions any of the prevailing dogma pretty quickly gets pushed all the way out, whereas on the Democratic side he’d be more likely to be appointed Senate Majority Leader.

Both parties do suck massively, but not to the same degree, and they have very different relations with their constituencies at the moment.

I’m assuming that the post was written to as a clever and subtle confirmation of Sunstein’s point that the Internet has lead to greater polarization (which Quiggin perfectly demonstrates by saying that the Internet makes it possible to dismiss conservatives out of hand)?

An equally fair rewrite:

Before the Internet, the average liberal or social democrat was largely insulated, on a day-to-day basis, from the kinds of views represented by the Democratic Underground or Daily Kos commenters that wish for Cheney’s death. Now we can see them minute-to-minute and it’s obvious that the idea of treating them as part of a legitimate discussion is absurd.

Moreover, where it was once possible to treat occasional public manifestations of Democratic Underground thinking as an aberration, it’s now obvious that this is how the Democratic base really thinks. So, any Democrat, no matter how superficially reasonable, must be regarded as someone who shares Democratic Underground views.

And that is supposed to prove that the Internet isn’t causing more polarization? If meant sincerely, the post is the most directly self-refuting thing I’ve ever read.

If she did vote for Bush in 2004 though, she did ensure the continuation of a war that was causing thousands of deaths and the perpetuation of a system that condoned and organized arbitrary internments and torture on a massive scale. Why she would do that is beyond me, but ignorance is the kindest explanation I can think of.

I expect she did vote for Bush (though I don’t know that for a fact). But perhaps it was because she believed that a withdrawal would likely have precipitated a full-scale Iraqi civil war and that it would have been immoral to abandon Iraqis to such a fate.

Now, you might think that belief was incorrect — that no such full-scale war would have resulted. But do you think such a belief on her part must necessarily be disingenuous?

Well, Bruce, they’ve been led to believe that they are under attack by millions of savage murderers, that illegal immigrants are plundering their country, minorities are favored for good jobs, promotions and college admissions, homosexuals prey on their children. And recently I heard from a young relative that the unions destroy the national industries – look at Detroit.

Under the circumstances you can’t really expect them to worry about things like Geneva conventions, friendly relations, theocracy and kleptocracy. There’s a lot of anxiety out there, you know.

And as my sense of how the whole works changes, I find myself with more and more angry contempt for all the clever people who use “NPR voice” to keep this disgusting crap in place, who trample on the very foundations of moral choice with bullshit rhetoric, and otherwise subjugate their humanity to the tyrants du jour.

True story: At the exact moment I was reading this, my local NPR affiliate opened a discussion about Rudy Giuliani by welcoming…wait for it…”Jonah Goldberg, author of the new book ‘Liberal Fascism.'”

As several posters have pointed out, there are still Republican voters who haven’t caught up with what has happened to the party.

Or they do know, but figure that for all their failings, the Republicans must be the lesser of two evils…”They’re all bums, so I might as well vote for the bums who won’t raise my taxes.”

Never mind my comment 48. The more I look at it, this whole thing has got to be a parody. “Why, the Internet doesn’t cause partisan polarization. My proof for this is that the Internet allows me to see that all Republicans are evil! Footnote: It allows Republicans to think of the rest of us as evil too.”

There’s no Republican group … promoting the idea of solid friendly relations with as many nations as possible as good for business.

Huh? Say what? Putting China permanently on the MFN list had at least as much Republican support as Democratic.

Nobody on the Republican side is making public noise about declining standards of living for America’s working and middle classes, nor the damage this does to family values.

No, they’re making public noise about the decline in family values, and the harm this does to living standards. There’s enough feedback that saying one is the cause, and one the effect, is simplistic on both sides.

And I have to say that I totally don’t see why “exploiting the LGF crowd” is a bad thing. Legalizing pot is a good idea, even though some of the supporters are disfunctional potheads.

Functional, you can add “incapable of reading”. Of course the Internet has accelerated polarization, and the post says so.

I read what you said; but you’re incapable of writing if you meant to say that the Internet has “accelerated polarization.” After pointing to Sunstein’s polarization thesis, you said, “It seems to me that exactly the opposite is true.”

In English, if you say, “Sunstein says X, but exactly the opposite is true,” then you’re not agreeing with Sunstein.

Bruce Baugh: “Not all Republicans are either LGF/Malkin-style bigots or deliberately exploiting them. Some are too stupid or ignorant to realize how their party has actually worked since 1994, and some believe that they personally are so suave, illuminated, or otherwise blessed as to be unaffected by it all. So there are jerks and fools as well as bigots and users. There are, however, no Republicans who are simultaneously informed, honest, and moral […]”

I’ve been saying that since, oh, 2000 or so — although I generally refer to it as everyone in the GOP being either stupid, ignorant, or evil — and somehow it’s generally dismissed as too partisan, rather than as an honest but impolite evaluation of U.S. politics, the actual positions of the Republican party, and the actual motivations of people who support those positions. I assume that the dynamic around this is going to be like what happened with anti-war views. Five years from now people will be saying “Of course Bruce Baugh was right about Republicans then, but he said it in the wrong way so of course we couldn’t listen to him.”

For the people whose mother is in the GOP, and therefore this just can’t be right, well, those are the kind of people who just can’t imagine that their mother is an actual person and therefore might be, as people sometimes are, uninformed, dishonest, or immoral. I’ve never found Argument Ad Mother very convincing.

I will never read “Liberal Fascism” — in that account, I am hopelessly polarized, against gibberish — but the idea of it strikes me as a rather canny bit of pre-U.S. election propaganda, since it has been taken up, perhaps according to plan, by the well-funded echo chamber, and with enough time left until November to filter down to the cheapo remaindered piles at Wal-Mart. Brilliant really. So: I think someone (with more free time than I,) should respond to this cue, and write a book entitled “Conservative Communism,” since there are not only endless instances of corporate socialism now plundering the public weal, but also conclusive historical examples, such as the new film “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days,” that the U.S. Republicans would have been rather comfortable in Ceausescu’s Romania.

…their mother is an actual person and therefore might be, as people sometimes are, uninformed, dishonest, or immoral.

I felt the same way after the 2004 election, that was very disappointing. But that’s half of the country you’re talking about, not a bunch of rednecks in white robes. There’s gotta be more to it; can’t be that simple.

> But I am pretty sure Sunstein thinks
> we have responsibility to seek out the
> best opposing arugments. And pretty sure
> he feels that the best opposing arguments
> would be civil in tone

Which we would do via judicious examination of reality, and the use of those fixed entities known as “facts”. Oh wait – didn’t another guys whose name started with Su write something about that?

Cranky

Rich Puchalsky: You were right on in 2000, too, and I was dead wrong thinking that there wouldn’t be much practical difference between Bush and Gore, and in thinking that the Republican regime was most likely to be sort of vaguely center-right technocratic in inclination. I’ve been trying to acknowledge the prior correctness of folks like you in recent years, but I may not have done this with your 2000 and 2001 commentaries. Well: you nailed it. If I’d listened to people like you and Avedon Carol, I might have been part of an attempted solution rather than one more muddled bystander. Most of the time I have the horrible ghastly feeling that the window of opportunity for useful redress is now long closed, but I’m resolved not to miss it if it’s there out of stupid quibbles about rhetorical nuance or whatever.

The Sadly, No! principle seems to apply here: as the marginal cost of putting opinions online diminishes to the cost of internet hosting, which is essentially free for the opinionator, it’s become possible to see fringe opinions before they’re refined into more palatable forms for mass distribution.

But when you delve down deeper into the barrel, you begin to find conservatives who will voice the forbidden tenets, and who couple them quite plainly to the Republican agenda — and the further into the barrel you go, the bonkier and whoopier and (most importantly) plainer the messages become. The nuttier winguts often parrot the talking points and the message wackily off-key, while expressing the meaning vividly and nearly 100% correctly, nearly all the time. They’re nearly an ideal source of insight.

On the issue of bipartisanship, the historical analogy that has long appealed to me is the Popish Plot / Exclusion Crisis era of 1680 and thereabouts. ‘Moderation’ at that time is implicitly a rhetorical, not an ideological posture.

Bruce, I certainly wasn’t trying to make you feel bad about anything, much less being a “muddled bystander”. It is very, very difficult for people who are used to some kind of rational analysis to accept that one side of a dispute really is entirely full of bad actors, because it so rarely happens, and because propaganda insists that it always happens. There’s still plenty of time to do things about it; I think that the critical period actually begins when Bush leaves. (Of course it’s too late for half a million Iraqis, thousands of U.S. troops, various ecosystems, the economy, and so on but I’m talking about the overall political situation.)

From elsewhere above: “I felt the same way after the 2004 election, that was very disappointing. But that’s half of the country you’re talking about, not a bunch of rednecks in white robes. There’s gotta be more to it; can’t be that simple.”

Yes, more than half the country is uninformed, dishonest, and/or immoral. That shouldn’t be a surprise. The number of “informed” people is generally smaller than the number “uninformed”, for any version of “informed”. And if you view the willingness to act on racist belief as immoral, as most people do, then of course that’s what the GOP Southern Strategy was all about. People in the U.S. do this curious dance where they all accept that a) the South votes as a bloc for the racist party, because of racism, b) that doesn’t indicate anything about the individual racists who want to e.g. keep black people from voting or address illegal immigration through taking measures that will have people dying in the desert.

It’s not that the Democratic party or any other party is full of saints. But the Republican party is now wholly dedicated to evil policies. The only way that anyone can currently support it is if they, personally, are either too ignorant or stupid to be able to know what is going on, or if they agree with its evil.

Even David Brooks:

Conservative institutions and interest groups proliferated in Washington. The definition of who was a true conservative narrowed. It became necessary to pass certain purity tests — on immigration, abortion, taxes and Terri Schiavo.

An oppositional mentality set in: if the liberals worried about global warming, it was necessary to regard it as a hoax. If The New York Times editorial page worried about waterboarding, then the code of conservative correctness required one to think it O.K.

Apostates and deviationists were expelled or found wanting, and the boundaries of acceptable thought narrowed.

(The blockquote didn’t work for the last two, but all three paragraphs are Brooks’)

I think this post demonstrates that when describing a political perspective that one opposes, it’s often very tempting to point to the least thoughtful and most outrageous examples as representative of that perspective as a whole.

On the second thought, I’ll admit that the neocons fucked them up good in the last few years.

Rich,

If its true that “more than half the country is uninformed, dishonest, and/or immoral” and if democracy is likely to put the majority in power, is democracy then a recipe for evil?

Rich,

Fair enough, but what about a Quiggin legitimatocracy where you can only vote if you are reasonable. Have we tried that one?

I’m not trying to be thick, honestly. Would it be possible for someone to explain what’s “exactly the opposite” of Sunstein’s argument that “the echo chamber effect tends to reinforce existing views and produce a poisonous partisan divide”? I mean, explain what John Quiggin was intending to say? I’m having difficulty understanding what’s meant by the opposite here, and in mapping it onto the post. I’m supposing it’s not the “In sum, Sunstein’s story is really about US Republicans* and not about the Internet,” which seems to quarrel with him but not to amount to the opposite.

I wondered the same thing.

I think he agrees with the effect(polarization), but attributes it to more exposure to the opposing viewpoints rather than less.

The “US Republican” parallel might be that busing caused movement conservatism. Being forced to interact led to more polarity.

Thanks for those clarifications. Makes sense to me, even if it’s not what I think of when I think of exact opposition. Putting aside the merits of Sunstein’s claim, or Quiggin’s alternative account, they seem fairly compatible. It’s not like Sunstein’s co-partisans are completely insular; they observe some external phenomena and react to it, and then reinforce their reactions.

Of course, they’re also not self-aware that they’re reinforcing only because of polarization; they always think it’s a product of their unassailably correct, mutual perception of the merits. Which is why this is such a tantalizing post and, potentially, group of comments.

“Didn’t we read recently that the largest plurality of blogs is by Japanese people doing LiveJournal-style ruminations on their daily lives?

They, like the Chinese, are probably being bigoted in a language we can’t understand (and indeed in a character set that shows up as question marks on Western screen). That doesn’t count.“

LOL! No probably about it, I’m a fan of (Some aspects of) Japanese culture, but there’s no hiding the fact that the Japanese are one of the most bigoted cultures on the planet. To the point where they have a hard time admitting that they’re even the same species as the rest of us, and are pouring enormous resources into developing advanced robotics, specifically so that they don’t have to import foreign labor.

On the main point, yes, it’s true: Exposure to liberals on the internet has actually worsened my opinion of them; Prior to the internet it was all to easy to believe the issues that separate us merely hid the deeper common ground, but arguing in the comment pages of places like Crooked Timber has convinced me that, if anything, the basic philosophical divide is deeper than public politics’ carefully blurred catch phrases make evident.

It’s easy to believe the bogey man doesn’t exist, until you venture into the forest, and he jumps out from behind a tree to start defending racial quotas or judicial mangling of the Constitution.

What’s funny about the Sunstein view is that this terrible partisanship is supposed to be drowning out voices – but the move is always then towards a nice centrism that, by coincidence, reflects all the GOP talking points of yore. So we seriously recognize the historical greatness of the New Deal but it is time to seriously reform social security. And nobody serious wants to withdraw from Iraq, as that would be a disaster. And we seriously have to cut back on our government spending, except of course for the military. And we can’t really take seriously these extremist outcries about our constitutional rights when we have to get serious about our security.

The funniest thing about the center is that it is never quite sure what we should make of the war in Iraq, and prefers the judgment of historians fifty years out. Was it a success or mass murder? Who knows? We must sternly await the verdict of history.

Meanwhile, this is the first presidential primary I’ve seen where one candidate, John Edwards, was almost entirely blanked out of the national media coverage because he was too far to the left – that is, almost as left as Jimmy Carter – while the press solemnly swore that Rudy Giuliani had not run in the primaries where he was trounced by Ron Paul, who wasn’t serious, and devoted much more attention to him than Edwards, pretending, after Iowa, in fact, that the race, bizarrely, was between the first place winner and the third.

What is truly worrying is that the old radical center is now filled with such deadwood – the Michael Ignatieffs and Cass Sunsteins and Brookings Institute apparatchiks. They have simply become a front under which the right does whatever it wants in terms of policy, with the center crying for civility and seriousness a la Joe Klein edges out any real dissent, appearing on tv and in the press as the only parameter to the left.

Which is the real reason they hate the internet. The only place where they can’t do the cowbird act and kick out real opposition to the establishment. That kills them. They hate people like Duncan at Atrios, because he is supposed to only exist on the fringes, up there with Noam Chomsky, and he’s an Internet star. Whereas I don’t believe there is one centrist internet star. Anywhere.

Glenn Reynolds functioned as a centrist blog star for a good run after 9/11. it’s not that he didn’t claim to be libertarian and all, but he linked so widely and was willing to give a friendly nod to all kinds of commentary that he got a pass for it. At least, he did until gradually making it clear that he was in the end just one more fan of kleptocracy and dead brown people.

And yes, I agree that what’s most suffered in the age of widespread blogging and linking is the abstracted equivalency stance of the “vital center”. Specificity breaks down the detachment necessary to keep doing the centrism thing.

77 — Orin, it’s actually kind of charming that Quiggin has enough self-awareness and is self-deprecating enough to admit publicly (heck, not just admit, but demonstrate) that he himself is biased by a “poisonous partisan divide” that keeps people from being rational and fair.

If by ‘center’ you mean ‘establishment’ (which seems to be the case here), then I agree – no one would want to read blog posts written by very-serious-people.

brett@95: ‘bogey man in the forest’? Curious analogy. Though I’m reminded of this, and how the internets have brought so many pale, dispersed libertarians out of their isolation.

roger@102: that Jonah Goldberg is participating in a ‘red-blue’ debate in a few months, with Peter Beinart as the ‘blue’ representative, boggles the mind.

Oops — misformating on my part. That second paragraph in my comment above is John’s, and should be in italics rather than plain text.

> As a result, I see the left and right as
> quite similar; there are reasonable people
on both sides and unreasonable people on both
> sides,

Where does Dick Cheney fall in your classification? What is the appropriate response when a Dick Cheney ends up in an office of extreme power?

Cranky

Cranky,

I think Dick Cheney is often unreasonable. The primary solution is to not vote for a ticket that includes Dick Cheney. If you have any other questions, just let me know.

Orin: …the all-too-common misperception on both sides is that one’s side is somehow special; that one’s own side has some sort of lock on the reasonable way of looking at the world. And the most common way of furthering that misperception is to focus on the least thoughtful examples of the other side as characteristic.

This sounds reasonable, until one remembers that the “least thoughtful examples” on the right controlled all three branches of government until recently, along with many state governments, large chunks of the mass media, and most of the business elite, and that they openly acknowledged and fanatically prosecuted their intention to establish a one-party state. The “least thoughtful examples” on the left (Bob Avakian? the Trotskyists?) have never come anywhere close to winning an election for student council. The parallel you’re suggesting seems preposterous, Orin. There’s every reason to focus on vicious and fanatical conservatives, since they run the country, and no reason to focus on vicious and fanatical leftists, since they are a thousand miles away from running anything but their own meetings.

But, Orin, that reaction would be objectively false, wouldn’t it?

There’s every reason to focus on vicious and fanatical conservatives, since they run the country…

SJ beat me to it. Big business runs the country, not conservatives. In respect to illegal immigration, for example, the establishment position is clearly in contradiction with nativism. In respect to most social/racial/religious issues the establishment is mostly indifferent and only uses them as rhetorical bait.

You could say (as it was said here many times) that conservatives are, in effect, enablers of various evils, but they don’t run anything.

Neocons fucked them up good, though. It’s much more natural and straightforward to view communism as a terrible existential threat than Islam. The movement has gotta be in a state of disarray now, all kinds of weirdness there.

I propose a thought experiment.

It’s 1997. Clinton’s been reelected to a 2nd term; investigation of various pieces of misconduct are underway in a big way. Newt Gingrich has his party machinery working smoothly now, and very little’s happening in the way of governance without his okay. Bin Laden’s put out a declaration of jihad, administration officials are secretly preparing to try asssassinating him, Republican leaders say this is all “wag the dog” business. Academy Award voters are all over The English Patient.

Now then. I go to some net forum of the time or write an article for a political magazine, saying that within five years, the Republicans will be back in office…and will immediately begin extensive warrantless wiretapping and planning an invasion of Iraq, both things they will claim retroactive justification for once terrorists destroy the World Trade Center. Within five years of that, there’ll be an ongoing occupation of Iraq conducted in flagrant violation of every principle of counter-insurgency, the president will have declared that he’s not interested in the mastermind of the actual terrorist attacks, and as a matter of policy the US will have abandoned the Geneva conventions in favor of torture and detention without habeus corpus. In many polls, two-thirds of the country will say they want the occupation ended and three-fifths that they want the president and/or vice president impeached; Democratic leadership will be boasting of their good sense in refusing to do either.

Would I be taken as anything but a particularly paranoid anti-Republican nut?

Analyses that presume a general equality of merit break down in the face of unequal results. Sometimes, maybe usually, more voices in one part of the spectrum are worth respecting than those in other parts.

This sounds reasonable, until one remembers that the “least thoughtful examples” on the right controlled all three branches of government

Anyone who says this about the current judicial branch of government in the United States is just paranoid, akin to a John Birch society member in the 1960s who thought that the Supreme Court was run by communists. There is no good-faith case for claiming that the judicial branch of government here is completely controlled by conservatives in the first place, let alone by the “least thoughtful” conservatives.

Meter,

I follow the Supreme Court pretty closely, and I think “functional” is pretty much right (although I wouldn’t compare the view to John Birch — perhaps it’s more like the mirror image of the worldview of Michele Malkin, Fox News etc). The Court is actually quite evenly divided. When I was clerking, in 2003-2004, the more liberal Justices clearly had the upper hand; last term, the more conservative Justices tended to have the needed votes. I expect that this Term the votes will generaly line up in a liberal direction. But on the whole, the current Supreme Court is a remarkably centrist institution.

Of course, that’s not what you hear if you get your “very close attention” impression of the Supreme Court from the New York Times or Slate, Those publications consistently leave the impression that the sky is falling and right wing radicals are in charge, much like Fox News consistently leaves the opposite impression.

Meter — one doesn’t have to pay very close attention to know how stupid it is to claim that all S.Ct. votes are right down party lines. Some Republican appointees, for better or worse, have voted to strike down various uses of the death penalty, to uphold affirmative action practiced by state entities, to reaffirm Roe v. Wade, and to strike down state sodomy legislation. I could go on and on, but those are the most well-known rulings from the past 5 or 10 years that any educated American would know off the top of their head.

#

So, any Democrat, no matter how superficially reasonable, must be regarded as someone who shares Democratic Underground views. And that is supposed to prove that the Internet isn’t causing more polarization? If meant sincerely, the post is the most directly self-refuting thing I’ve ever read.
Posted by functional · January 25th, 2008 at 2:44 pm

I think Quiggin is arguing that the internet has increased partisanship because of exposure, not withdrawl of exposure, as Sunstien apparently argues.

At the National Review, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism blog features a letter from a high-school debate coach who assures Jonah that his opponents can’t argue. Oh, and coach’ll read Liberal Fascism ASAP.

I think it’s going too far to say that the entire Republican base is as nutty as its leading voices, but the leading voices seem to be fools or just wrong, and taking their arguments seriously is not far removed from earnestly dealing with UFO nuts.

Here’s a funny axe-grinding essay by Austin Bramwell written after his departure from the National Review’s editorial board. It’s largely about groupthink and includes amusing sentences like “To be sure, conservatives have hotly denied the charge of neoconservatism but never by actually disagreeing with it.”

Geo — so you’re backing up your ignorant assessment of the judiciary by citing the ludicrously biased website of People for the American Way? I would link to a Free Republic site in response, but that would be just a joke on my part, whereas you seem to think you’ve made a serious point.

Fascinating.

functional: none of the people on either side argue in good faith.

orin: everybody on both sides (aside from psychos) argues in good faith.

Can’t you guys your get story straight?

I have come to believe that right wingers *are* arguing in good faith. It’s just that their underlying moral philosophy is completely broken. Situations like the present US have arisen many many times in history, and sadly I’m not aware of any where the schism was repaired by talking. (Could be that my grasp of history is deficient) And this is the problem with Cass Sunstein’s thesis: the problem here isn’t remotely associated with new (bad) communication modes spontaneously generated by the internet; the problem is that a powerful political faction has gone seriously awry in a classic way, and human beings have not yet developed an effective means of repairing the dysfunction without a lot of damage. So we fight. Let’s keep it to the internets, I say.

Russell — First, Orin and I are not the same person, so there’s no need for us to be consistent with each other. Second, I never said that all people argue in bad faith. Some people do argue in bad faith, of course, but I would never cherry-pick a stupid argument from Crooked Timber and claim that it represents all of the left.

Functional: Are you sure you’re not equating “ludicrously biased” with “harshly critical of the Bush administration”? Save the Courts argues using facts and reasoning; Free Republic mainly uses slogans and venom. Can you specify what you found inaccurate or tendentious about the posts on Save the Court? And of course, they’re hardly the only possible sources for the claim that the Reagan and Bush administrations emphasized ideology over competence to an unprecedented degree in judicial and other appointments.

Rich and Russell: Yes, in an ultimate sense, everyone is in good faith, if that means believing that their reasons are good ones, or no one is, if it means being completely objective and disinterested. But short of the ultimate sense, there are people who actually listen to the other side, who try to figure out how the world looks to the other side, who seek out the best possible arguments for the other side and respond to those rather than to the weakest ones,
and then there are people who don’t let their legislators from the opposition party discuss proposed legislation, who pass shady legislation in the middle of the night, who vow not to bring legislation up for a vote unless it is supported by “a majority of the Majority [party],” who bully and misrepresent their interlocutors on talk radio, etc., etc.

Distinctions aren’t metaphysical; they’re practical.

Seth,

What law are the Justices interpreting in your hypothetical? Without knowing that, it’s hard to understand what your hypothetical is asking, and impossible to connect your choices to any particular political valence. Or so it seems to me.

Functional:

Are you suggesting that the Heritage Foundation is ludicrously biased? If your hypothetical liberal said that it was, you’d ask for some evidence. That’s why I asked you for evidence about Save the Court. The burden of evidence is on someone — in this case you — who tries to discredit a finding — in this case, that Bush administration judicial appointments have been wildly partisan — by alleging bias rather than by rebutting it.

But let’s leave Save the Court aside. Consider merely the prima facie evidence. 1) The Bush administration immediately transferred the function of certifying judicial nominees from the relatively nonpartisan American Bar Association to the extremely partisan Federalist Society. 2) During the first three years of the Bush Administration, the percentage of Republicans in the federal judiciary increased from 46 percent to 57 percent. 3) Ten percent of the Bush nominees were in their thirties or forties — highly unusual and obviously intended to minimize the appointments open to the liberal successors. 4) Has there ever been such a parade of extremists and hacks proposed for the bench as Miguel Estrada, Priscilla Owen, William Pryor, Charles Pickering, Carolyn Kuhl, Janice Rogers Brown, and — for the Supreme Court — Harriet Miers? 5) Cass Sunstein in the American Prospect: “The ideology of recent court appointees seems closer to the Republican Party platform than to the United States Constitution.” (Quoted from memory.) And all this is off the top of my head — didn’t require the “several hours” that you scorn to waste on me.

Tossing around terms like “ignorance,” “stupid,” “insupportable,” and “to laugh” won’t cut it, my man.

bruce, come on man, not even John Yoo thinks that the legislation is totally irrelevant to the question. What kind of extremist are you?

orin, don’t you see where you are? Back away slowly.

We’re more than 140 posts in, and, with about a half dozen exceptions, we might as well have been reading John again and again. I think Sunstein’s book says something about that. It’s a bit late, but I suppose not too late to point out that, contrary to the John’s suggestion, one of the arguments Sunstein makes is that the sort of thing we see at LGF and the sort of thing we see here have very little to do with what people “really think.” The same mechanism that leads to the most extreme posts at Free Republic leads to the confident dismissals of Sunstein’s book here by a bunch of anonymous (and not-so-anonymous) morons.

If only the typical comment thread here could be populated by people who write like John Quiggin again and again, rather than by conservative trolls who call people morons.

John Q.’s point was really pretty simple. Sunstein wrote that people would only seek their existing views, and become segregated. While in fact everyone here is regularly exposed to conservative views, and can see how contemptible they are. That isn’t some generality about how everyone finds everyone else’s views comtemptible. Viewed through any kind of civilized norms, the torture-supporting, warmongering, racist, theocracy-friendly U.S. conservatives — which is to say, all of them — really are contemptible.

You’re doing a good job of parroting a few left-wing talking points and meaningless factoids. But you’re still miles away from even pretending to defend the original assertion, which was that the “least thoughtful” conservatives control the entire judicial branch. (You’re basically claiming that people like McConnell or Kozinski or Posner or Wilkinson are the “least thoughtful” people around, which is just idiotic whether you like their politics or not).

A bit of reflection produces this:

“You’re doing a good job of parroting a few leftright-wing talking points and meaningless factoids.”

Fixed, you’re welcome.

For those who derive pleasure from voyeuring vacuous ideology transformed into religion I hereby direct you to the candidate endorsement posts on Eugene Volokh’s (“I think the government should torture people before it kills them”) site. The whole crew shows up, including Orin.

Oops, I violated Sunstein’s thesis.

And I don’t even have to spoon out my eyeballs and stomp those suckers flat.

Regarding “What law are the Justices interpreting in your hypothetical? Without knowing that, it’s hard to understand what your hypothetical is asking …”

Umm, it’s a hypothetical example, hence it’s a hypothetical law. The idea is to illustrate that a mix of sane and insane people can readily be rhetorically presented as some sort of sober moderation.

Any specific example can be nibbled to death by ducks, as the saying goes. It’s a careless hack who would write something like “we’re approving torture because we can”. I think Bush v. Gore is the classic example there (of alleged judicial reasoning that lined up exactly with political expediency).

by the extremely, unrelievedly partisan nature of their judicial appointments.

No one thinks this except for extreme partisans who get all of their information from an echo chamber in which activist groups wildly exaggerate every perceived “wrong” decision by any Bush judge. The fact that you aren’t aware of this echo chamber just confirms the echo chamber’s power.

No, it’s “if you’re saying things that can be supported, if at all, only by reference to the most patently biased sources of information, then you should consider whether you’re the one living in an echo chamber.”

As far as I’ve seen, no one around here has enough basic self-awareness to even think about that point.

Rich,

“Viewed through any kind of civilized norms…”

This is hyperbole.

I will try to be less so. MANY civilized civilizations have been warmongering, some racist, a few even real live theocracies.

And only a very, very few have had norms that were neither torture-supporting nor warmongering nor racist nor theocracy-friendly. I mean by those standards, the chamber of civilizations is so small you can’t even get an echo.

Would you give me partial credit if I agreed with a re-phrased version like

“Those of us that believe that ideals such as peace, racial equality, government free of religious superstition, and the progress of universal human rights find the Bush Administration contemptible”?

On my optimistic days I agree with you. On my reality-based days I think “contemporary civilized norms” have both a short half-life and limited cultural reach.

In the long run we’re all barbarians.

Rich,

I think you are right, but I’d say its more a close majority than a very wide range of agreement. For example, the world values survey shows a pretty broad range of values on gender equality, secularism vs. religion etc.

But if you are right that there is a broad consensus that norms are being violated, then I think you would have to conclude that the enforcement of norms by the people of civilized countries is fairly impotent.

In other words, you have to concede that the majority you refer to is either not that committed to enforcing its norms or it is fairly powerless.

Geo writes:

Orin: You seem like a thoughtful and civil person, so I sincerely hope you won’t take offense. But your suggestion that everyone on both sides is in good faith is not merely preposterous, it is utterly preposterous.

I absolutely agree that such a position would be utterly preposterous. Fortunately I have not taken such a position.

Anyway, this is an interesting thread — I may try blogging about these issues over at the VC.

Ah, my apologies for the misunderstanding. I meant to be referring specifically to the issue Functional was discussing. Functional had written that “There is no good-faith case for claiming that the judicial branch of government here is completely controlled by conservatives in the first place.” In my response, I argued that actually good faith was near universal “when it comes to these topics,” but I wasn’t at all clear that I was placing that limitation on it. So just to be clear, I think that those who make claims about who controls the courts are almost always acting in good faith; I didn’t mean to suggest that all people everywhere make statements in good faith. My apologies for the unclear writing.

Oops, some spelling errors above. Meant to say “I’m not American”